Glassbeam, Inc., the machine data analytics company, announced a new white paper authored in conjunction with Harbor Research that highlights the unique challenges faced by the Industrial IoT analytics market in the areas of data management and transformation. The expanding market around connected machines and analytics has been well-known for several years, but it is still widely misunderstood how data transformation and management tools are critical to the development of IoT and Smart Systems solutions. In fact, over 60% of time and cost in a typical IoT analytics project is spent on critical tasks of data parsing, aggregation, assimilation, and transformation before any meaningful analytics and machine learning value can be deployed to create business value from this data.

Harbor Research facilitated discussions with various industry and data experts, OEM manufacturers and end-customer equipment operators, including various customers and partners of Glassbeam, to arrive at its conclusions. It was clear that without an advanced data management and transformation solution in place, users are only scraping the surface of the full value of their data. Most data management and analytics solutions today can analyze sensor data and basic historical data, but these solutions cannot handle the complex machine logs produced by a growing number of advanced machines being adopted across a wide range of industries. New levels of value and insight can be leveraged from this complex data, but this major opportunity requires a new data transformation and analytics approach which the Glassbeam solution delivers.

Key highlights and findings of this report include:

Data formats and data variety from connected machines will drive significant value: In 2017 alone, the Harbor Research Smart Systems Forecast Model estimates that 4.8 billion new IoT devices will go online, driving over $30 billion in new value related to connectivity and subsequent data gathered and analyzed from these devices.

Proper Data Transformation is critical to success of machine learning projects: Building a machine learning algorithm may only take up 20% of the total time spent by a data scientist, but significantly longer amounts of time must be spent transforming the data for use before the model can be trained. This process becomes even more challenging when complex log data, with a wide variety of potential variables that cannot be manually parsed in an efficient manner, comes into play.

"The steps required to glean insights from complex advanced machine data are not well understood by OEMs, end users, or the vast majority of analytics solution providers" said Puneet Pandit, Co-founder and CEO, Glassbeam Inc. "As a result, legacy data management solutions built in-house by OEMs leverage traditional data management solution and methods that are cobbled together in a manner that is not equipped to face these challenges. Glassbeam enables the true potential of such projects by providing an end-to-end complex data transformation offering for machine OEMs, end customers and traditional IoT platform providers".

"Data transformation is the unspoken bridge between connectivity and analytics" says Glen Allmendinger, Founder and President of Harbor Research. "As connected machines become more pervasive and intelligent, there is a huge untapped market opportunity for data management, transformation, and eventually analytics with machine learning for multi-structured log data. Glassbeam is purpose-built to address these challenges, allowing end-users to realize new levels of value from data, while also achieving significant predictive cost and time savings".

About Glassbeam
Glassbeam is the premier machine data analytics company bringing structure and meaning to complex data generated from any connected machine in the Industrial IoT industry. Funded by several ultra-high net worth investors, Glassbeam’s next generation cloud-based platform is designed to transform and analyze multi-structured data, delivering powerful solutions on customer support and product intelligence for companies such as IBM, Dell EMC, Novant Health, and Dimension Data. For more information visit http://www.glassbeam.com or follow us on Twitter @Glassbeam.

Founded in 1984, Harbor Research Inc. has more than thirty years of experience in providing strategic consulting and research services that enable our clients to understand and capitalize on emergent and disruptive opportunities driven by information and communications technology. The firm has established a unique competence in developing business models and strategy for the convergence of pervasive computing, global networking and smart systems.